Sky City is a high-rise complex bringing together shopping, entertainment, offices and housing. A continuous, undulating landscape threads between its stacked floors, organising commercial and public activity as an urban space extending into the air.

The design develops the idea of the ‘production of spectacles’ by sampling everyday urban life, cinematic settings and consumer culture. Familiar landscapes and fragments of life are enlarged, transformed and recombined like pieces in a kaleidoscope, creating settings charged with imagination and desire. Goods, images and human aspirations interact within them, making commercial space a setting for both social encounters and consumption. Image, programme and space are considered together in response to the concentration of life within the high-rise complex.

This ‘landscape flow’ gives the proposal its spatial structure. An undulating band opens a fissure in the dense building mass, creating the impression of buildings suspended above a canyon-like plaza and distinguishing public commerce from more private spaces. Extending diagonally and spiralling downwards, it connects different levels. Retail areas form island-like clusters around it, served by branching primary and secondary routes. The stepped atrium canyon establishes visual connections between floors, allowing visitors to see activities and merchandise on other levels as they move. Circulation, sightlines and commercial connections become interwoven.

The building’s forms correspond to this organisation. ‘Sandwich’ layers accommodate different programmes; folded planes enclose through-routes and extend retail frontages; undulating roofs accommodate the terrain of an elevated ski slope. A ‘Tower of Light’ combines vertical circulation, sightseeing and the imagery of light. Artificial snow, an elevated shopping forest, places for tea and expanses of flowers unfold along the landscape flow. Continuity and contrast give the journey the rhythm of a cinematic montage, while changing light and colour by day and night reinforce the image of a suspended, flowing city.